Posted
by
samzenpuson Thursday August 19, 2010 @07:40PM
from the gasoline-and-head-shots dept.

Whether they spoil in the heat, freeze in the winter, or get taken out by a human-friendly venue of vultures, a zombie outbreak is unlikely to succeed. Here's 7 reasons why we should stop worrying about the shambling dead and start concentrating on a real threat: sparkly vampires.

But there is a huge market for all things zombie, and it doesn't even seem to have peaked yet. Zombies are the new vampires, and to date none of them sparkle in the sun.

Most of the zombie fiction is just a different approach to RPG-style problem solving, and has the same appeal. A zombie outbreak happens near you, and the zombies work this way. What do you do? What do you eat? How do you defend yourself? Do you find others, or avoid others? etc, etc. It's good fun.

That's what you think. Just wait until I finalize the deal with my publisher and my first novel hits the market. It features Zack the Zombie and his star-crossed love affair with teenaged Sarah, a clumsy yet lovable girl I'm sure young women across the country will fall in love with.

It wouldn't be hard to really. Look at the average post-goth teen. They're still in love with death and the macabre. A vampire is just an undead human if you remove the demon aspect. Stephenie Meyer did that *shudder*. I suppose, you could have teen protagonists, one of which dies and comes back, and then they try to make it work. Think about Return of the Living Dead 3 and factor in some of the recent zombie mockumentaries where zombies are vying for civil rights. I think, sadly, a teen zombie romance is a

Been done. Check out Breathers: A Zombie's Lament [amazon.com] in which the main character is, "a newly risen zombie, he's forced to live in his parents' basement, attend Undead Anonymous meetings just to get out of the house, and endure abuse of all kinds from the living." A fun read.

Zombies are the new vampires, and to date none of them sparkle in the sun.
Want to know why zombies are so cool? Because Hollywood will never be able to get 14 year old girls interested in crappy zombie romance/emo books and movies....

It's true. My lack of hygiene, tattered clothes and strange grunting noises prevent any 14 year old girls from taking an interest in me.

Actually, while humanity had a ton of imagination when it comes to fearing death, nothing even came close to the modern idea of vampire.

What Europe believed in is better described as "revenants", or what we nowadays think of as "zombies." They weren't supposed to be some clever and scheming count, but mindless bloated corpses of some peasants.

Oh, and generally they'd transmit disease generally by just being there not by bit. Remember it was an era where even an educated medicus knew that diseases are transmitted by smells (no, really, the miasma theory of disease) and everyone else knew that corpses cause disease. A corpse walking around was a health hazard by itself.

And just to drive the "zombie" aspect home, most of these were supposed to be literally brain dead. E.g., the ones from an outbreak in Venice could be prevented from biting anything ever again by just shoving a brick in the corpse's mouth. Your average Dracula or White Wolf kinda vampire would be sentient enough to basically go "oh, i have a brick in my mouth" and spit it out. Heck, even the dumbest animal would. But the version those people believed in would be forever thwarted by that brick because they weren't even able to figure that out.

Other forms of thwarting an undead included the equivalent of the frat prank of tying someone's shoelaces together, except it was more like tying the ends a piece of string to the big toe on each foot. Yep, that would thwart them.

Even when myths gave them a couple of neurons still working, then they'd be riddled with a crippling OCD, so they'd irresistably stop and count the grains in a pile of rice or whatever.

Basically they're not quite the smart and scheming baron kind, nor the kind who'd blend in and maintain a Masquerade. They were mindless rotting corpses.

The modern idea of a Vampire was pretty much used invented by Polidori in "The Vampyre", sort of reused in "Carmilla" (where it got some sexual part added too), but only really became mass known via "Dracula". It's really not about any single "ancient" myth, but a mix of several of those. Including a lot of the witchcraft beliefs, incubus beliefs, and various assorted other bits and ends. And yes, some stuff taken from fairies too.

Basically what Polidori, Le Fanu and Stoker did there was already inventing a new kind of vampire and romanticizing it to appeal to their target audience. That was it, really. And each of them felt free to add a few personal touches and mix some even more unrelated mythical monsters to the definition of a Vampire, to make it even more mass-appeal. Which is basically why you've heard of Dracula over and over again, but most people never even heard of Carmilla or The Vampyre.

Complaining that someone else did the same thing is a bit silly. Yes, Twilight included some stuff from an unrelated mythical beastie. What, unlike Stoker, Anne Rice, White Wolf and everyone else... who added bits from unrelated mythical beasties too?

Of course, this all depends on what your definition of zombie is.
Some people are strict with the human 'undead' moniker, but as I recall, the zombie dogs in the original Resident Evil game were the scariest aspect of Zombie-dom ~'97, so branching out to the animal kingdom and accepting Ants who are under the influence of the pod people under that Umbrella (hur hur hur

Not to mention they are forgetting why Zombies ended up winning in the Romero flicks...human stupidity. If you remember the original Dawn of the Dead you had people believing it was part of the judgment and actively hiding dead relatives from the police and by the time they would find a "nest" it would have often spread to an entire building and made the entire building a threat.

The problem with any of these "disaster A can't happen" is they always assume humans will band together and act logically which

The problem with any of these "disaster A can't happen" is they always assume humans will band together and act logically which if anything history has taught us in a widespread panic humans are as dangerous and stupid as any other scared animal. To quote MiB "A person is smart, people are dumb, dangerous, panicky animals and you know it.

You know, I love that quote as much as anyone but I'm not convinced it's true. Think of the times when people really HAVE been up against the wall in large numbers, with a cause they believe in, and I think you'll find that in general, we're pretty good in a pinch. Take, for example, the British in WW2. They're having the absolute shit bombed out of them but they stayed organized for the most part and put up a hell of a fight.

But you are missing the fact that they had Churchill to lead them by example and to rally the troops, whereas in a zombie or other mass disease attack most likely the leaders would run for it like everyone else. We simply don't create leaders like Patton and Churchill anymore, instead we get politicians who will save their own ass first and foremost. Can you really picture Obama (or Palin or your choice of politician) standing there to rally folks with the risk of contagion like Churchill was willing to walk through bombed areas with the threat of further bombing looming?

Then of course you have the religious aspect, which would REALLY bite us in the ass. If you remember Dawn of the Dead those that believed in the judgment actively helped the zombies believing that the walking monsters were really their dead relatives being risen by their God. In large cities this would create a quickly escalating situation, where just like in the movies believers would attempt to "care" for their dead relatives, getting infected themselves, and by doing so creating "nests" where whole buildings would become infected.

In the end it would come down to whether or not we have any leaders that are willing to risk their own asses and make the hard choices on the spot. Sadly what we have now is a spoilt ruling class used to be coddled and treated like little kings that would probably abandon us at the first sign of danger to themselves. The days of leaders like Churchill that were willing to risk their lives for their people are long past I'm afraid.

Persons identified as zombies are to be found among the inhabitants of Haiti, an impoverished and politically unstable Caribbean country with unique cultural characteristics. Using the lens of the anthropologist, an investigation into Haitian zombiism reveals not only a basis for the bizarre phenomenon of zombiism itself, but also the underlying characteristics of Haitian society that have fostered and it. While zombiism may be fundamentally understood in terms of mental illness, particular theories related to madness are useful in further illuminating the subject, including Sigmund Freud’s signature theses on melancholia, Frantz Fanon’s views on the psychological effects of colonialism, and Emily Martin’s ideas about the performance of mental disorders. The resulting analysis will demonstrate that Haitian zombiism constitutes a
cultural construct of madness that thoroughly fits within its post-colonial population, where a bereft people have transformed zombiism into a reality.

Are there really zombies in Haiti? Wade Davis devotes two long sections to this question. He first looks at the popular views and then explores cases where there have been some attempts to carefully and more scientifically determine the status of suspected cases. His key candidate for zombiehood is Clairvius Narcisse. In spring, 1962 Narcisse "died" at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Deschapelles, Haiti. His death was verified by the hospital staff. 18 years later Narcisse turned up alive and well, and claimed to be an escaped zombie.

No, I did not read through those articles. I just remember watching an interview with some scientist that researched out the sposid myth. So I knew therw was legitimate research into it.

But isn't Haiti where the whole Zombie theme came from? The movies that I remember always had someone performing some type of magic to make people into zombies. The zombie leader. And that second link refers to what could be a classic Romero zombie, or at least close to what we consider the movie zombies.

His key candidate for zombiehood is Clairvius Narcisse. In spring, 1962 Narcisse "died" at the Albert Schweitzer Hospital in Deschapelles, Haiti. His death was verified by the hospital staff. 18 years later Narcisse turned up alive and well, and claimed to be an escaped zombie.

We don't know if he consumed human flesh when in captivity as a zombie for 18 years or not.

But the links were just to show there is actual research into this, thats all.

That you're not taking this seriously is a reason why the zombie apocalypse will succeed!

Yes, I believe the zombie originated in Haiti. I think the word too comes from Haiti. I can't remember how much influence the Haitian zombie had on those classic zombie movies.. I mean like "white zombie" etc. I do remember that Romero said that he never thought of his ghouls as "zombies", and he never actually used the word to describe the monsters in his Living Dead trilogy.

Yeah, well our vampire trope was mostly laid down by Bram Stoker, and there was nothing sexy about them back then. They were just a particular kind of mostly-mindless undead with pretty specific rules for how to dispatch them (nothing that doesn't also work on humans, mind you). Later additions by Anne Rice made vampires sexy and mysterious rather than just bloodthirsty and undead. These days they've been romanticised to the point where there are barely any drawbacks to being a vampire (gee thanks Stephanie

Actually, my neurobiology professor [wikipedia.org] (who has a definite knack for explaining complex ideas in everyday language) gives a great lecture on Haitian zombies from a neurobiological and athropological perspective.

Basically, some Haitian (or more commonly, a bunch of Haitians) gets really pissed off at a person, and hires a witch doctor to "curse" them. The curse turns out to be slipping them some tetrodotoxin (better known in popular culture as "the thing in blowfish/fugu that paralyzes you"), which then... paralyzes them to a state in which they can be mistaken for dead.

Most probably die. It's a pretty good poison. But once in a while one of them, after being taken for dead for up to a couple days, actually "comes back to life". This of course freaks everyone out (and gives the witch doctor some major cred). And now this person was officially cursed by the witch doctor, and came back from the dead. He's a zombie! Everyone in town is now both disgusted and somewhat frightened of him, and he starts to believe the stories (and conform to the stereotypes/myths). A zombie is born!

What you think. When the government cover ups are broken through by dedicated hackers, the facts are clear. There have been over 43 reported outbreaks of zombies in the last 100 years. It is people like you who prevent the truth from being free. The dead will walk again, as they have been for hundreds of years. It is only through the brave efforts of the ZDF that have kept them in check.

People involved mass murder are pretty close to zombies. The outbreaks are more localized and there may be an ostensible purpose, but the devotion to killing is both stupid and somewhat contagious. Ideas can be pathological, and a mind can die while the body is still animated.

At least they didn't do it when the majority of their readers were at work. That site is highly addictive [xkcd.com] and it's likely that no one would have gotten any work done for the rest of the day. Of course, there might be a large chunk of the workforce that goes into work tired tomorrow because they get to sleep late...

7. Natural predators can become zombies, too. Then where will your living natural predators be, hmm?

6. Zombies rose from the dead, some years-dead. Making them deader by drying them out isn't going to affect them.

6. Zombies rose from the dead. Dead is even more inert than frozen. Therefore, frozen isn't going to faze them.

5. Biting works for rattlesnakes, black widow spiders, rabid dogs, and yucky girls with cooties. Zombies are onto a business model here.

3. It's not like we're picking a Zombie President early in the cycle. There are zillions of them. Damage to one leaves another undamaged. You can't beat them in reasonable time with iterative solutions.

2. You can run. You can hide. But death comes to us all. And then you'll be the zombie in the place behind the incorrectly designated zombie-proof barrier.

1. Unless you plan to make bullets out of zombie finger bones, you're going to run out of bullets before you run out of zombies. Zillions, man. Zillions.

Yes, there are two rule sixes, and NOOOOOOO...rule four. Clearly not a Python sketch.

8. To survive as a species, each zombie has to kill one person before becoming disabled. A person in an average car should be able to disable a dozen zombies before they succumb to hood damage. The zombie numbers dwindle.

Unless you're talking about Romero's "Dead world" films. Only a bite will infect a living person, true, but anyone who dies and is not disposed of properly rises again for some reason.

That's The Night of the Living Dead's whole thing, where the zombies dig their way out of graves, unbitten, to attack the whole world at once. The following chaos and disruption greatly increases their numbers not only through bites, but through any incidental deaths that occur.

Come on now. Everyone know if you eat zombie flesh you become a zombie. Before you know it we'll be up to our necks in zombie lion, zombie tiger and zombie bears. However, zombie birds will probably be the worst considering the distances they can cover.

So, so tired of zombies, pirates, ninjas, and robots. Jesus, Internet, can you please latch on to something else? Anything? I know whatever it is you latch on to will still get annoying, with 18 year old girls running around pretending to be cute and funny, but just being fucking annoying, but for the love of god, let the Zombie bullshit die.

Are you tired of the internet, and Jesus, too? You could always avoid the internet for a few hours a day if you are tired of zombies, pirates, ninjas, robots, or Jesus. But they will all find you, and probably when you least expect it. Don't forget, not everyone is as wise or experienced as you when it comes to zombies, pirates, ninjas, robots, the internet, and Jesus, and more people are discovering these things (I call them the Super

So, so tired of zombies, pirates, ninjas, and robots. Jesus, Internet, can you please latch on to something else? Anything? I know whatever it is you latch on to will still get annoying, with 18 year old girls running around pretending to be cute and funny, but just being fucking annoying, but for the love of god, let the Zombie bullshit die.

Hmm, I have an idea. How about we use one of the most ferocious predators on the planet...the shark! And then, to make it unique, we need to add something. Something deadly, but impractical, for comic effect. How about lasers? Sharks with frickin' laser beams on their head...how's that?

Don't forget, we have not studied zombies in any great scientific detail, and we have a poor (at best) understanding of the mechanisms behind zombification and how it spreads. The possible interdimensional implications are intriguing, and are one facet of this phenomena that we still know absolutely nothing about, thus we can not formulate a plan to stop it. This isn't just a virus, folks.

Don't panic.... yet. Have a disaster survival kit, and a plan, and don't forget to include provisions for earthquakes,

It failed because creating zombies is a lot of work. It's definitely real, and it involves basically poisoning a person and damaging the brain so as to remove most of the thinking part. Basically leaving you with a mindless human to use as a slave. The other problem is that having damaged the brain you're left with something that doesn't really think and is easily out witted by even the dimmest grade school child.

I've barely grown this to a full blown fantasy and now it's crushed (or its head has been blown off). Why can't I have one deeply warped narcissistic apocalyptic fantasy that is not ruined by science and logic? Damn you science, damn you all to hell!

Just give it a twist. How's this: The military industrial complex has created nanobots that can live indefinitely in a soldiers blood stream, and which quickly close woulds and repair damage using the body's own resources. If their numbers in the soldiers blood stream are reduced, perhaps by significant bleeding, they will reproduce until the appropriate population density is reached. The work the nanobots do can leave the soldier quite hungry due to the consumption of bodily resources. There are a few

Don't get all sciency with your zombie explanations. I was perfectly happy having an anomalous radiation spike inextricably raise the dead to a lumbering state. Explanations, plausible ones at that, are just unacceptable.

...so explain to me how #1 will solve the problem of say, India. Oh sure, #1 will keep you safe for awhile in the lightly populated, heavily armed western united states, but what about the rest of the world? You got enough bullets to stop the other 6 billion people on the planet?

Most Zombie literature holds that large-scale weapons like bombs, machine guns, artillery and explosive weapons are ineffective. Some take the tack that the outbreak happens so quickly that we don't get use them because the Zombie overwhelm the delivery systems (you can't drop a bomb without a plane; no pilots? no air base? no bombing).

I think this undersells military weapons and how effective they might be.

A gattling-type machine gun or minigun would be devastating in massed crowds -- it'd be like using

It is true, zombie outbreaks are pretty much doomed from the start. I mean shit, just jump in a tank and start killing. It isn't like they can hurt you. It isn't hard to devise a shelter that zombies can't get into where you can safely kill hundreds or thousands. The military alone could probably kill a few thousand per soldier. You might think we have more people than bullets, but seriously, we don't.

That said, there is way to get around this and let the zombie apocalypse happen. Imagine if zombies c

You're really going to tell someone with a UID only 530,295 higher than yours that they're "new here"? Your UID is hardly lower than mine either. Also, do you know what the current UIDs being handed out are? I doubt it.

I now bow out for someone with a 5 digit UID to come in and smack you around, to be followed by someone with a 4 digit, then finally a 3-digit. (Much lower than that is an extreme rarity... I mean, there ARE in theory only 90 2-digit UIDs...)

History has shown that in most awful situations, people don't always act like the panicky idiots in a horror movie. In cities, people would likely congregate in the upper levels of high-rise buildings, where the invasion can be held at bay with simple security doors.

B. Hiding in the top of a hi-rise with one way in and one way out is the sort of thing a panicky idiot would do.

...or someone thinking strategically, knowing that the onslaught can only last a couple weeks, thinking there's probably enough food for everyone to survive on the upper levels, and knows there's enough guns and ammo to hold that perfect choke point for a month.

Some myths to accept as truth BEFORE considering why a Zombie Outbreak would fail:

(1) Zombies are real(2) The Zombie infection is viral and spread by getting Zombie fluids (blood, saliva, etc) in another body. It also requires an incubation time.(3) Zombies need no form of sustenance (food, drink, oxygen, etc)(4) Zombies eat as an instinct... and it's their only instinct.(5) They can only be killed by destroying their brains (dealing sufficient damage)(6) Zombie "blood" is thick and gooey, does not evaporat

You're pretty much correct. Although I would say #8 is debatable. I believe that as a result of physical limitations placed on a zombies nervous system and joints and muscle due to death, a zombie likely would shamble. Maybe it's a matter of age though. A "new" zombie that turned fairly quickly could quite possibly be one of those new fast-moving zombies. A zombie of something buried many years or a zombie that's existed for a long time probably shambles. Maybe, it's the ultimate fate of every zombie to bec

TFA seems to takes only one possible zombie scenario; the dead rising from the grave. Most of the more well thought out zombie scenarios seem to have zombies as a secondary effect of a primary event. Take for example "Omega Man" where most of the population is killed off by the virus, while a large group turns into zombies, and a small group is simply immune. The primary catastrophe is the collapse of modern society due to massive population decreases. The surviving humans, even without the pressure of an u

I especially like the point about the sheer number of armed individuals. Makes me think the only semi-viable zombie outbreak scenario is something like Highschool of The Dead, where an outbreak occurs in urban Japan.

But even in Japan, I don't imagine an outbreak would last very long.

I doubt the zombies have much to worry about from the Japanese police though, they've already had an aversion to using their guns ingrained in them through training. Add to that the stress and sheer 'omgwtfbbq'-ness of the situation, and I think it'd be more likely to see many of them either completely freaking out, or making an ultimately futile effort to use batons and riot shields against the zombies. And even the ones that actually use their firearms against the zombies will quickly go through all the ammunition they have access to and be screwed.

I imagine the JGSDF would fare a lot better, even with the psychological factors. The question is, how badly outnumbered would they be by the time someone thinks to officially mobilize them?

But hey, if all else fails, the US military presence in Japan could probably take care of it themselves. I wonder what kind of legal and bureaucratic messes would be involved in mobilizing the US military for actual combat operations on Japanese soil, even in an emergency...

ever evolved to infect our species you'd have something pretty close to a zombie outbreak.

Imagine, people infected with something which diverts their basic instincts, millions more parasites start growing in their flesh and they protect them as an otherwise sentient free humans with all the zeal and ferocity that someone will protect their children.

I, for one, leave it to the US to deal with zombie outbreaks. You, guys have so many weapons stashed up it would be a joke to deal with a couple of zombies. Just get to Europe, will ya?

Sure, like how "we" handled Katrina? The BP spill? Wonderful. The first official act would be to round up all the survivors and confiscate their weapons, then leave them in a stadium with no supplies. Then just one infected gets mixed in with the others...

A mutation of several well known parasites could very easily create a very real infectious parasitical disease similar to that of zombies.
All we need is some rage, a dash of EXTREME HUNGER, and a sprinkle of adrenaline, and some transferral method of the parasite.
There you go, a very real and very dangerous outbreak.

There are several examples IRL of parasites and fungi that modify the behavior of their hosts to increase contagion. Apply this to humans as a host and there are several potential approaches. I think the aggressive approach may not be the most successful though, as people tend to kill and/or avoid overly aggressive people. A more successful approach may be for the host to experience a desire for companionship, close proximity to others, and physical contact. This would increase probability of contagion

There are several examples IRL of parasites and fungi that modify the behavior of their hosts to increase contagion.

Yes, there have been media reports in recent days about new information regarding a fungus that "zombifies" ants, causing them to latch onto particular parts of plants with a "death grip" until they die, allowing the fungus to mature and spread. This is not the only zombie pathogen known.

A more successful approach may be for the host to experience a desire for companionship, close prox